Often times, rumination is rooted in chronic conflicts with people and frustrating situations. Normal emotional processing searches for positive solutions and possibilities. Resiliency courageously responds to adversity with thinking differently, resolving a situation, and moving on. Ruminating gets stuck in a negative feedback loop of replaying the past repeatedly without helpful change.
Ruminating Keeps You From Your Potential
Potential and rumination are not friends. Dwelling on negativity, stress, and frustration is a barrier to experiencing well-being in life. It keeps us from getting in the flow and being productive. It ruins our relationships. It prevents achieving at high levels. It robs our life of meaning and purpose. The kicker is, ruminating is something we control. We allow it by believing our own thoughts that are not true. I know this from experience. A life of flourishing and reaching The Peak of Potential is thwarted by ruminating.
By nature, I am a person who is curious. I want to know how things work and why. The quest for understanding takes a wrong turn because we allow our minds to overthink and obsess. This can become very troublesome if we cannot shut off our thoughts and stop thinking about them.
Rumination and Its Results: Highly Contagious
This negative mindset spreads like a virus. By sharing our rumination with others, they get pulled into the negative emotions and behaviours we have. We can infect others with anger, frustration, criticism, victim thinking, and lashing out. To use the language of the pandemic we are living through, we must learn to practice “social distancing” and quarantine destructive, stressful thoughts. Potential and rumination are not friends.
Rumination leads to added stress and its bad fruit. Overthinking can produce a negative frame of mind, anxiety, depression, self-sabotage, hypertension and heart disease, unhappiness, obsessing, and complaining. As Jon Gordon in the “No Complaining Challenge” says, “One of the biggest threats to building a great team and organization is complaining. When we complain we focus on everything else but being our best. Complaining actually costs the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity and it will sabotage the morale, engagement and culture of your team if you let it.” Will Bowen’s “A Complaint Free World” is another great resource to change complaining behaviour. Both of these approaches eventually lead back to ruminating.
Sadly, I have been part of multiple workplaces and a family situations where rumination and complaining made life unbearable. I have also struggled with these negative behaviours and their consequences until my research on potential led me to an “aha moment” while reading an article about the mental health effects of the current COVID-19. It was as though that word lit up in bright lights as I read–RUMINATE. During the pandemic, we should not ruminate on all the negative impacts this horrible situation is having. I wrote about this in my article, “The Potential of Hope.”
Let’s Stop Ruminating
Pulling that thread further reading journals, articles, and blogs on the subject, my mind started connecting dots and filling in blanks. In a moment, I had understandings about workplace and family situations past and present. I saw how I had ruminated and infected others, as well as been infected by others. My will began fighting against the negative environment I have been battling. I had understood some, but not all of the complex web of tentacles in my own situations. As a business executive, trained philosopher/priest, coach and consultant, researcher and writer, that familiar burst of inspiration came–I need to tell others–follow me, there is a way out of this!
Ruminating and complaining negatively impact a person or group of people by keeping us from becoming all we are capable of becoming.
Rumination can result in depression, anxiety, and physical ailments of stress-induced illnesses.
Letting go of rumination can be very difficult, especially when we have actually been wronged. Do you struggle with getting stuck on the negatives in life? I can share from experience that we must move on quickly from stressors and not ruminate on them. Ruminating can literally make you sick, kill you, and as Warren Buffet says, destroy in five minutes what you have worked 20 years for. So what we do?
REMOVING RUMINATION
1. CHANGE OUR STRESS RESPONSE: I have had the most success learning how to think differently using Byron Katie’s “The Work” approach. This is a systematic way to stop believing our own thoughts that are not true. The process helps identify, capture, and take a second look at thoughts that makes us stressed. Then, turn your thoughts on their head to think differently about the situation and give yourself more options about how you can think about the situation. There are many methods of stress management and boundary setting we will explore in future blogs.
2. EXERCISE AND HOBBIES: This common advice works! Taking our mind of stress helps. Physical activity helps decrease cortisol levels in our blood. Hobbies divert our thoughts away from stress and ruminating toward using our minds for more productive and creative purposes that being happiness by expressing and achieving.
3. MEDITATION, MINDFULNESS, AND PRAYER: In the moment, we can allow thoughts and emotions arise and pass away without having to do anything with them. Learning to sit with a stressful or negative thought, then stop thinking that thought, and simply be. We can stop thinking any thought, and focus on the present. We can focus on our breath, art, or our heartbeat, or the stars in the sky, or the wind in the trees, or the sounds around us in nature, and then begin to ask for our thoughts to now be filled with solutions, with ideas, with creativity. As Sam Harris says on the Waking Up app, “It can be the difference between having a brilliant career, surrounded by creative people you love working with you, and being the scary guy in the office.”
Potential and rumination are not friends. To become all we are capable of being and doing, we must not allow the detour of rumination divert us on our journey to reaching the Peak of Potential.